Steve Jobs: a lifetime of visionary disruption in advancing technology

While building NeXT, Jobs had also acquired the graphics division from George Lucas' Lucasfilm for $10 million, hoping to create high end graphics hardware systems under the new name Pixar. That venture was ultimately no more successful than NeXT's hardware, targeted largely at higher education and the professional workstation market.

However, Jobs saw potential in the application of computer graphics as a content production company, and subsequently formed a partnership with Disney to produce computer animated films that Disney would finance and distribute. The resulting movies, beginning with "Toy Story" in 1995, ended up being a series of box office successes over the next decade, making Pixar the most successful animation studio in the world and culminating in the 2006 sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion, a transaction that made Jobs the largest individual shareholder of Disney and a member of the company's board.

In parallel, Jobs' efforts to find a market for NeXT's advanced technology were increasingly thwarted by problems. After Microsoft prevailed in Apple's "look and feel" lawsuit claiming infringement of original Macintosh concepts, the company was emboldened to appropriate not just Apple's efforts, but also NeXT's. In 1995, Microsoft introduced Windows 95, which borrowed as much of its look from Jobs' NeXT environment as it did from Apple's Macintosh.

Microsoft had also waged a vaporware war against NeXT, with Bill Gates claiming his company would soon deliver the same kind of object oriented development tools in Cairo, a project that never materialized as originally described.

Again, Jobs reached out to form partnerships with Sun, HP and others. After the hardware business end of NeXT failed to gain traction, Jobs rapidly transitioned the company to focus on developing advanced software development tools and a highly intuitive user environment, creating a layer of software that could potentially run on any hardware.

And once again, Jobs' partners ultimately double-crossed him, with HP leaping to join IBM and Apple on a competing partnership called Taligent, while Sun abandoned Jobs' vision for an open specification for a software development environment based on NeXT's technologies, after working with NeXT to create OpenStep, in order to instead pursue its own Java, a language and runtime environment that similarly worked to displace the SmallTalk-inspired work NeXT had developed a decade earlier.

By 1996, Jobs had focused NeXT upon web applications as the most viable option for applying its technology, but the near collapse of Apple provided a new opportunity for the company. At the end of the year, Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million, aiming to use its powerful, flexible operating system and advanced development environment to revitalize its increasingly outdated Mac platform, following the collapse of both the Taligent partnership with IBM and Apple's own internal Copland project.

Jobs initially appeared hesitant to become involved in running Apple, which at the time had profound operational problems, a tarnished brand, and was experiencing staggering financial losses. Apple was also facing increasing pressure from Microsoft Windows, which had erased much of the Mac's differentiating features while promising to deliver a graphical computing environment at a lower cost than Apple by leveraging the vast economies of scale in the PC industry.

As Jobs examined the state of Apple ten years after his departure, he began to identity a series of things the company had to stop doing, while also creating a strategy for recovery centered around innovation. Jobs made aggressive cuts to Apple's complex product lines, resulting in a radically refined number of Mac models just one year later and a termination of poorly conceived Mac OS licensing program that had originally been created to imitate Microsoft's business model.

Instead, Jobs pushed through a public agreement with Microsoft that exchanged a vote of confidence by Microsoft in Apple (via both a publicized investment in stock as well as a commitment to bring modern versions of Office software to the Mac) for a cross licensing agreement that terminated longstanding legal challenges Apple had in play against its Windows competitor.

At the same time, Jobs rapidly pushed the new Apple to deploy NeXT's state of the art web application technology to build a sophisticated online store capable of selling custom built Macs directly to users. Jobs also recruited Tim Cook from Compaq to help solve Apple's operational mess, which included closing the company's complex network of factories and storage warehouses that were taxing the company's productivity and profits.

Adapting work Apple had previously done to create a Network Computer, Jobs unveiled the iMac in 1998 as a signature new distinct offering that would define the look of its products around the millennium. Applying a industrial design team lead by Jonathan Ive, who had joined Apple in 1992 before being promoted to lead Apple's design in 1998, Jobs worked to build a recognizable, high quality product experience around the Apple brand.

Jobs also initiated a retail store effort within Apple, recruiting Ron Johnson from Target to lead the company's retail push and installing Millard Drexler, the chief executive of J Crew and former CEO of the Gap, on Apple's board.

By the end of the 1990s, Jobs had turned Apple from a beleaguered failure into a regularly profitable company with a revitalized brand and a clear future strategy, although there was still considerable doubt about whether Apple's hardware business could ever become anything more than a niche business servicing a dedicated following of loyal customers.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Most people term Steve Jobs' intensity as passion but it is indeed Love.

Love is the universal vital force that is creative and brilliant and to be in love or passionate about someone or something or an idea is really a symptom of Love.

It is that Love, that Life Force and Brilliance, that original and creative vitality, that Steve Jobs, like no other, put into his work, into his baby Apple Inc, into his many products, and I'm sure into his family, and that energy, once embedded into each and every product and into Apple itself, is recognized by everyone.

We all feel the Love, Beauty, Brilliance, Creativity, Joy and Light in Apple's products and, in a Love starved human society, that's why we desperatly want to buy them, own them, show them off. For they bring those very same qualities into our life as well.

Many Apple fans recognized this when they described Apple's struggles with their copycats as the fight between good and evil.

This Love is the energy behind Steve Jobs, Apple's products and Apple, Inc..

This Love is the energy Steve Jobs used to build his company and choosing its workforce and the reason why everybody, consciously or not, are relaxed regarding Apple's future without Jobs' physical presence. Apple is full of Love centric people who can do anything other than execute on the principles of Love and its many expressions. Even its organization, I speculate, is built upon that same core energy.

That Love energy is obviously expressed into the new Apple spaceship headquarters in more ways than one. It is like a castle protecting the Love inside. It's like a spaceship indeed, where dreams and vision can fly and become materialized in purity with little interference. It's shaped as a 0 (zero) which, like the number 1, spells Unicity and God. 0 and 1, the digital values.

Last but not least, Steve's comments about life and death came from experience: he "died" when he was thrown out of the company he started. But, while he turned that into an opportunity, he used it as the base to re-invent himself and start with a clean slate. And what this "death" brought him the most was summed up in this word: [b]Focus.[\\b]

Love, Brilliance (a derivative of Love) and Focus (a lot of Love).

His lessons to the world. His legacy. Our inheritance from Steve Jobs.

The world is now a better place, the world is richer!

I Love Steve Jobs.

Long live Steve Jobs!

Long live Apple, Inc.!

Wishes of Joy, Love and Light to all, especially to Steve Jobs' family and friends (Steve's family is indeed great).

Steve Jobs was a Buddhist in spirit. So his essence will always be with us. Just look in your hand, or on your desk, or in your lap, or as you listen. The essence of the man is right there in front of you. I think he will always be.

Steve, by human measure, did many great things. He will no doubt be remembered for many generations in history books and many people will write honoring articles about him. However, being a Buddhist, he did not recognize his need for a savior, Jesus, and will not be in heaven. We live in a pluralistic and relativist society, where we often hear, "what is right for you is right for you and what is right for me is right for me". It does not pain me to say this: there is only 1 afterlife and where you spend it is dependent upon the acceptance of being a sinner and thereby accepting that Christ died for our sins. That is what saddens me most about his death, is that he will not be in heaven. Im not trying to be disrespectful or put a downer on things: Im am just speaking the truth and it needs to be said.

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Beautiful words to live by. Whilst I was reading them I was listening to the radio. They were playing Fairport Convention's 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' in memory of Bert Jansch who died yesterday. It was wonderfully apposite.

Steve, by human measure, did many great things. He will no doubt be remembered for many generations in history books and many people will write honoring articles about him. However, being a Buddhist, he did not recognize his need for a savior, Jesus, and will not be in heaven. We live in a pluralistic and relativist society, where we often hear, "what is right for you is right for you and what is right for me is right for me". It does not pain me to say this: there is only 1 afterlife and where you spend it is dependent upon the acceptance of being a sinner and thereby accepting that Christ died for our sins. That is what saddens me most about his death, is that he will not be in heaven. Im not trying to be disrespectful or put a downer on things: Im am just speaking the truth and it needs to be said.

Your truth my friend - and you are putting on downer on things. In fact, you are being offensive. Very offensive. The fact that you state that what saddens you most about his death is that he won't be in heaven, sums it up. The rest of us celebrates his life and mourn the loss of a great man - one that has put a smile on my face almost every single day for the last 30 years.